


Your Ex-Lover Is Dead

by TrivialPursuit



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012), The Incredible Hulk (2008), Thor (Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Past Relationships, Possibly Unrequited Love, Post-Movie(s), Pre-Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-30
Updated: 2013-07-01
Packaged: 2017-12-06 22:58:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 5,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/741147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrivialPursuit/pseuds/TrivialPursuit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eventually, they all had to move on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Nothing Left To Burn

**Author's Note:**

> This piece was inspired by and best accompanied by 'Your Ex-Lover is Dead' and 'One More Night (Your Ex-Lover Remains Dead)', both by Stars.  
> This can be viewed as canon for the Triviaglass 'Verse but is not seen by the author as such.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His Vdova is dead, this is Natasha, a woman with whom he shall be perpetually strangers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zhiguli was the domestic name for the Lada.  
> 'Vdova' means widow in Russian.  
> Eau de Cologne does in fact have a history of being used as a surrogate alcohol among poor alcoholics in Eastern Bloc countries due to its comparative cheapness to vodka.

She's walking down the street in the middle of December, snow dusting the pavements of New York. The baby, carefully bundled up in layers of clothing, is strapped to her chest in one of those frontal slings for carrying babies, perfectly normal to the untrained eye but he can tell that it's reinforced with Kevlar panels. Roman Bryusovitch, the file says the baby's name is, she always liked that name, said it was noble. She walks to a red Zhiguli, stooping to unhitch her offspring into the rather hellish looking carseat in the back. The watcher laughs when he sees it, the car's the same crappy one she drove whenever she was off-mission back in Russia. He remembered kissing her in the back of that car ( _It's 1974 and it's snowing in Moscow. They do not care that an American President is about to be impeached, that clay soldiers are taking over the world, or that revolution is in the air. The do not care because they are alive. There is sticky red blood in her hair and on his hands. She tastes like vodka and he thinks he might love her._ ). She lets out a cooing sound, tickling her son's stomach and he thinks she looks, for one solitary second, like a human.

The watcher remembers when she was his and he was her's, before Gorbachev and the fall of the Berlin Wall and Gouzenko and democracy and the _Perestroika_. During the good old days of the Cold War when everything was clear-cut, East versus West, Communism versus Capitalism, Superpower versus Superpower, Spy versus Spy, Missile versus Missile. The days when, to get drunk, they drank _Eau de Cologne_ when vodka was too expensive, when televisions caught on fire, when you went to the depot to get what you needed, waiting hours in line only to find they had run out of everything. That was a long time ago, he thinks.

A man walks up behind her wraps and the watcher can feel himself tensing up, ready to spring on this threat, but she smiles and sinks into the man's embrace. They make a handsome couple, he decides, much better than she and the watcher ever were (They were never really a couple though, were they?), or perhaps not _better_ , simply more _real_.

She and the man climb into the car, the man tightly strapping on his seatbelt and clutching slightly at the bottom of his seat, looking vaguely worried as she puts in the key to start the engine, which sputters for several minutes before stalling. The man smiles and tosses his hands up into the air, muttering something which makes her laugh the way he used to make her laugh.

Her husband opens the hood with some effort while she gets a small tool box from the trunk and they both start to poke at the various components, screwing, tapping, testing, and wiping, trying to determine the cause of the car's trouble. The man makes one last adjustment and she is able to start the car. She giggles like a child as the climb back into the car and she wraps her arms around her husband's neck and kisses him like a teenager.

He leaves her with her husband and baby. His _Vdova_ is dead, or at least has been encompassed into a greater whole person who has likes and dislikes and loved ones and possessions. This is Natasha, a woman with whom he shall be perpetually strangers.  
He walks into the police station three blocks down and holds his hands in the air.

'My name is Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes and I'm here to surrender myself to the US government.'


	2. Set Yourself On Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He's not her Bruce anymore and can never be again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this a long time ago, and then a few days ago I watched The Incredible Hulk and decided to revisit it.

  When she sees him for the first time in six years it’s at a conference and it hurts, she’s not ashamed to admit it. He’s presenting a paper with Jane Foster, who, up until the alien invasion in New York, was largely disregarded as a crackpot, on inter-dimensional travel. He’s also presenting a solo work on water filtration in third world countries and she almost wants to laugh and ask when he’d become an expert in that. But she doesn’t, because that’s the world he’s been living in. And besides, her Bruce was always so incredibly brilliant. (But she has to amend that statement, doesn't she? He's not her Bruce anymore and can never be again.)  
  He presents both papers with his usual modest affability, rumpling his hair and smiling self-deprecatingly as he talks, letting his partner jump in whenever. And it's brilliant, sheer, undiluted brilliance, but her Bruce was never anything less than that. When they're finished giving the almost three hour talk the two scientific misfits get a standing ovation, the first she's ever seen at a conference. His second paper has a more modest audience, in one of the smaller ballrooms, but he makes good points, is clear in his ideas, and is able to answer every question with an occasionally uncomfortable level of detail. Tony Stark jumps up on stage halfway through and they banter about the best ways to creating infrastructure. She pays little attention to the conversation, absorbing only that it is witty and erudite, instead watching, fascinated, at the way Stark just inhabits Bruce’s space, like he has every right to be there, and Bruce allowing him to do so. Even Before he had maintained a fairly well-defined bubble of personal space and she had considered herself privileged to be one of the few allowed inside the bubble.  
  When he's finished, he and Stark retreat to what has been dubbed by several of the more disparaging and juvenile of the attendees as the 'Freak Court', hosting the likes of Dr. Reed Richards, Dr. Hank Pym, Dr. Pamela Isley (in a straight jacket, guarded by a couple of well-armed orderlies), Dr. Henry McCoy, and Dr. Charles Xavier. She remembers when they used to be practically glued to each other during conferences, and now she stands in the middle of the lobby by herself. She's lurking behind a pillar watching him interact with his peers, interact in a way he never did before the Accident, he smiles and he's comfortable with these people in a way he never was with his old peers.  
  A cell phone lets out a piercing ring and he excuses himself to answer it. She recognizes the tone he uses when he picks up the phone because it's the tone he used to speak to her in; amazed, loving, and always vaguely frazzled, except he's speaking Russian and all she can think is 'When did he learn Russian?' She's abandon all pretence of hiding and is standing out in the open gaping at the man she was once sure she was going to grow old with. Suddenly, a hand pulls her back behind the pillar she just abandon and finds herself face-to-face with Tony Stark.  
  'Hello Dr. Talbot.' His tone is nothing short of nasty and she finds herself shrinking into the wall.  
  'Mr Stark.'  
  'Here's the deal; Bruce, he's happy. It took a really long time for him to get over all that shit between you two and I'm pretty sure his wife will disembowel you if you so much as talk to him, and do you know what? I'd help. When he needed you you weren't there and now you're married and you can't have him but that doesn't mean that nobody else can.' He glares at him and she feels guilty, because even though she'd been trying not to think about it too much, she knows that what she's doing is selfish.  
  'What's her name?' Stark looks at her quizzically, 'The girl, what's her name?'  
  'Do you really want to know?' And she realises she doesn't, because as soon as she knows he won't be her Bruce anymore, not even in her mind, he'll be someone else's.  
  'Have a good day Mr Stark.'  
  'You too Dr. Talbot.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At one point in the comic continuity Betty marries a Major Glenn Talbot.


	3. Strange To See You Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She doesn't dance anymore.

She doesn't dance anymore. Howard calls her once a year on the anniversary of the Crash, it's not the only time he calls her, but it soon becomes the only time he's sober. She and the remaining Howling Commandos and Colonel Philips are at his wedding (She can't help but dislike Maria, who is neither what Howard needs nor who he loves.), but she smiles and kisses both their cheeks. When little Anthony is born Howard calls her in a drunk mess, sobbing about how Maria wanted to call their son Stephen. All she can do is listen as to a grown man sob like a small boy she thinks he never got the chance to be.

She turns ninety-two in 2011, and she's proud of this fact, though her only family (A grand-niece named Sharon) lives in San Francisco and is unable to fly across the country to celebrate it with her. She is fond of New York, and still mobile enough to be able to enjoy it. She lives two blocks down from where the lab Dr Erskine died in was and she likes to watch the little barber shop that sits there now every so often. When Anthony announces he is Iron Man she cannot help but send a letter to him, though she doubts he'll ever see it, telling him how proud she thinks Howard would be. 

She sits in her apartment or the park across the street and reads or cooks. When the Chitauri come she takes her old service revolver and all the bullets she has siting around and stands on her balcony shooting at them. It hits her like a punch in the gut when she sees him fighting with that goddamn shield (Her first thought is that the man is an impostor, but that is quickly banished when S.H.I.E.L.D. announces that he is, in fact, the real Captain America.), and a little selfish piece of her wishes he really did die when they said he did because she mourned for him and what right does he had to finally get defrosted now that she's old and wrinkly?

He calls on her and she serves him tea and scones and they talk and laugh. After the fourth of such events she realises she doesn't think of him as the same person she knew seventy-odd years ago, he's rather more like the son or grandson in her mind, even if they do laugh over old jokes and she thinks he sees her the same way, as a friend or family member rather than an old lover, and that's okay with her. For Peggy Carter, Steve Rogers has been dead for seventy-one years.

He meets a nice girl who works with him at S.H.I.E.L.D. and brings her to meet Peggy, which makes Peggy happy, she never had children of her own so she's happy to play mother for this lost boy out of time (She can't help but like this Maria, who is exactly what Steve needs.). When they get married she gets to sit in the front pew on the groom's side next to Anthony and his wife and their two children. She smiles and kisses Maria's cheek and tells her how perfect they'll be together.

Steve and Maria have three children together and they all call her Grandma Peggy and toss their chubby baby arms around her neck and smile and pet at her white hair.

When she dies, for the first time in a very long time Margaret Carter has a family.


	4. This Scar is a Fleck on My Porcelain Skin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The next day a Soviet defector is shot and Logan wakes up alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been trying to keep the pairings canon, but I'm not sure how canon Natasha/Wolverine is.

The first time he meets the _Chernaya Vdova_ (He doesn't meet Natasha for a long time after that and he's pretty sure he'll never meet Natalia) is in a bar in Prague in 1949. She sits in the corner of the bar, set apart from the swarms of men that patronize this particular establishment. Her scarlet hair looks like blood in the orange glow and everyone gives her a wide berth despite the crowded nature of the room. He sits right next to her and orders a beer. She takes him back to his hotel room and the sex is something else.

(The next day a Soviet defector is shot and Logan wakes up alone.)

They are sex and blood and fear and glory. While it lasts it is fantastic and the world is alight around them, but eventually they've reduced everything else to ash and they themselves light on fire. After that things between them fall apart quickly and violently. There are arguments and silences and shattered plaster and broken bones (The make-up sex is literally killer). Ironically, the split itself is amicable enough, she smiles and kisses him on the cheek before scooping up the bag that's been siting packed under the bed for the past month and walking out the door.

They see each other once and a while every few years, meeting simply as friends instead of lovers. Sometimes, seeing her is like a breath of fresh air after spending your day in a dive bar in 1960. The rest of the time it's like a white-hot needle in his gut, reminding him of all the friends he's lost and that neither of them should exist in this time  
(Later, much later, the duo will become a trio with the addition of one Steve Rogers, but that's another story.)

Years later they are reintroduced through work, at a benefit for the rebuilding of New York, she smiles and loops her are through his to the shock of several teammates.

'I think we've met before,' he says and she tosses her head back and laugh. (Logan can't help but think how wrong he was, because he knows the woman who's talking with him right now is Natalia.)

  
Logan likes Natalia. He can never be in love with her because, no matter how little he sees of her, her heart was taken by a doctor in Calcutta. The crazy thing is, he's okay with that.


	5. There's One Thing I Want To Say (So I'll Be Brave)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They go out together for three months in their junior year of high school between Valentine's and mid-May.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This pairing defiantly isn't canon but I wanted to do a story from someone other than one of the Avengers' life.  
> The quote comes from Legally Blonde and the idea of being 'Not married to someone for the rest of your life' comes from Four Weddings and a Funeral.

They go out together for three months in their junior year of high school between Valentine's and mid-May, and they are best friends for six years before that. It's the first 'serious' relationship either of them have been involved in and, to quote Darcy herself, 'It's pretty goddamn awesome'. And it is.

They're not one of those couples that fizzle out or break up, amicably or otherwise (No matter how much Darcy wishes that was the case.). No, they don't do that because on May fourteenth Bobby just fucking disappears, leaving nothing but a note for Darcy and the rest of his friends and family. She spends the weekend curled up sobbing into her pillow then gets up on Monday, smears on her favourite lipstick and plasters a smile on her face. She knows she wasn't in love with Bobby, mostly she's just massively pissed off that he left her like that because nobody fucking does that to her without suffering a little. But Darcy moves on with her life because, to quote the great Professor Stromwell 'If you're going to let one stupid prick ruin your life, you're not the girl I thought you were.'.

Darcy graduates near the top of her class and gets into her top university pick. Then, to get a measly six science credits she gets shipped off to Bumfuck, New Mexico, where the craziest things happen to her. And Darcy fucking loves it, because she gets to taze gods and fight (in a relative sort of way) giant robots-things and fuck yeah, science. She and Jane get shipped off to freaking Norway, which is cold and miserable, then New York gets attacked by aliens and she and Jane get packed off to New York to live in some swanky tower with a pack of superheroes and swarms of minions, making Darcy the fucking Queen of the Minions.

Darcy meets a nice guy who appreciates her snark and inane pop culture references and who has great arms and a pack of his own issues and they are awesome together. Clint is brilliant, she decides, and she's going to be not married with him for the rest of her life.

And then fucking Bobby Drake blunders back into her life. And it turns out the fucker has some sort of mutation and he decided that he couldn't trust her with this information and had to just get up and leave. He's standing in the middle of the remains of Central Park (They seem to destroy it a lot) in his fancy leather catsuit.

'Darcy?' She's been having a celebratory, old-fashioned make-out with her boyfriend when some asshole yells at her.

'What do you - Bobby?'

'Darce–' He's cut off by the resounding slap across his face.

'Bobby Drake, you fucking left me without so much as a 'fare thee well'. I don't care that we were together, I was your friend and your don't treat your friends like that. One day we'll talk and I'll get over it but today is not that day. Today is the day that I hit you and tell you exactly what an asshole you are.' Darcy turns on her heel and storms away.

Darcy Lewis is fucking awesome, no matter what.


	6. I'm Not Sorry There's Nothing To Save

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes it's all sunshine and roses, rainbows and unicorns. Sometimes there's fists and screaming and shattered plaster and sleeping on the couch.  
> (Either way there's always entirely too much booze.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got the idea for this story from a panel of a comic that showed Mockingbird hitting Hawkeye.

Sometimes it's all sunshine and roses, rainbows and unicorns, whatever is your preferred expression, it's going pretty great. Until it isn't any more.

Sometimes it fucking hurts too. Sometimes there's fists and screaming and shattered plaster and sleeping on the couch. Sometimes there's vodka (It doesn't have to be vodka, anything with an alcohol volume will do.) fuelled screaming matches at a bus stop (in their apartment, at their friend's place, in restaurants or bars, on trains, planes, and automobiles). Sometimes a co-worker or friend raises a concerned eyebrow at the dark circles under tired, angry eyes. Sometimes the concern is shrugged off but other times there are tears and tissues and counsellors and lawyers. (Either way there's always entirely too much booze.)

She tells him she hates him once and he slumps down on the bed that hasn't really been their bed for months (He's glad that he insisted on getting a nice couch.) and tells her that he knows. She knows everything's over when he stops fighting for whatever this is. He'd always say everything worth having is worth fighting for and it stings, because she's fallen into the 'Not Worth Fighting For' category, which might even hurt more than the breakup of their marriage.

Then there's moving out of the apartment they shared for the entirety of their relationship and finding a new one. All the places she looks at seem crappier then the apartment he painstakingly selected with the enough viewpoints and the perfect number of exits and the right wind shields and everything else that he was so goddamn picky about that she now misses (Except she doesn't really miss them, does she? She misses the familiar instead of the Great Scary Unknown.).

She had a friend once, and whenever the friend was making a big decision she'd make a pro and con list, so that's what she does.

_Pro - His laugh._  
 _Con - He doesn't laugh anymore._  
 _Pro - We were awesome together._  
 _Con - We're not awesome now._  
 _Pro - Great sex._  
 _Con - Hate sex does not make a health sex life._

The list goes on and on, and she adds to it whenever she can think of something. But, even if all the Pros outweigh the Cons, and even if they manage to get back together, she's Not Worth Fighting For anymore, and no matter how much that hurts for her, she can't allow herself to be so selfish that she disallows him from having a relationship with someone who is one hundred per cent worth every battle.

The divorce is messy. She makes it that way, trying to get him to do _something_ , to fight her on _something_ , whether it's that he gets the set of plates that he loathes or that she keeps his beloved couch. He doesn't fight her on anything and she plays the bad guy. She fucking hates it because she is the bad guy, and she knows it and the whole goddamn world seems to know it except for him because he's being so goddamn apathetic to her, like this is his fault or something.

Coulson reassigns her after the divorce comes through, and she really can't blame him, considering she's being a bitch to everyone he ever called a friend and so she packs off to fucking Afganistan, where you can't get a good rebound fuck to save your life. Instead she leans to knit and do yoga. Bucharest is next and she teaches herself Chinese and how to make dumplings then Helsinki and pastry and skiing.

Aliens try to blow up New York and the reports say that he was there. Coulson dies and nobody's stupid enough to try to reassign her stateside, no matter how crippled S.H.I.E.L.D. is right now. So she sits in her crappy, government-funded apartment and watches.

Eventually she meets a nice guy, and she's not watching the world unfold alone anymore.

Now, even if it is for someone else, she's back in the Worth Fighting For column.


	7. I Chose to Feel it and You Couldn't Choose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He sends her letters because she likes opening her mail over coffee and emails because he can't always bother to post letters at least every week. She texts him every night before bed and they Skype as often as their schedules will allow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jane and Donald Blake, defiantly a very odd story, but give me a chance.

They're both working on their doctorates when Jane Foster meets Donald Blake in the campus coffee shop exactly six minutes before her next class in the Escher Building (Fifteen minutes away when running.). She rams into him, knocking them both flat on their asses and sending her on a slightly crazed rant on how nobody watches where they're going anymore. Fortunately for her, Donald Blake was the odd breed who found these vaguely vitriolic neo-hippie rants to be cute and quirky rather than the mark of someone who was a few cards short of a full deck. (He walks her to class and tells her professor it was his fault that she was late before asking her out on a date.)

They go out for a year and a half. Sort of. Jane breaks up with Donald after a year and a half, exactly two days after they both graduate with their PhD.s. She insists that he's going to work for Stark Industries in New York and she's working in Bumfuck, New Mexico that their relationship is simply not practical and that it would be better for them to pursuer their options in their separate states and ends of the country. (He camps outside her apartment until she relents and they get back together.)

Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, Jane is the first one to say 'I love you'. (He never says it back, which hurts, even though she never tells him that.)

He sends her letters because she likes opening her mail over coffee and emails because he can't always bother to post letters at least every week. She texts him every night before bed and they Skype as often as their schedules will allow.

So maybe that's why she's so shocked when he turns up on her doorstep in the middle of February with an overnight bag and a pack of condoms. He spends a week in New Mexico, much to Darcy's joy Jane spends the grand majority of that time in her bedroom. It's pretty fantastic, Jane decides, she's got an awesome boyfriend who loves her and flies across the country to visit her. And then the penny drops. On the last day on his visit he sits her down at the kitchen table and breaks up with her.

Needless to say, she kicks him out of the auto shop cum lab and gets really really drunk. (He's a little too terrified of her at this point to bother trying to get his stuff back.)

The next month and a half is, according to Darcy and Erik, really scary. Jane oscillates between the borderline obsessive mad scientist that she usually is and a sobbing, blubbering, drunk wreck. She is not exactly proud of her behaviour during this period of life, though it more has to to do with how it affected her colleagues and work than actually regretting her brief foray into alcoholism.

Thor shows up in the first week of April and sweeps her off her feet. The rest, as they say, is history, abet very classified history.


	8. You Were What I Wanted (I Gave What I Gave)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They meet in Budapest through the scope of a sniper's rifle. He's at one end and she's at the other (Who can pull the trigger is entirely up for debate).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just can't get behind Clint/Natasha.

They meet in Budapest through the scope of a sniper's rifle. He's at one end and she's at the other (Who can pull the trigger is entirely up for debate). A phone rings and the voice on the other end says 'I could shoot you right now.'

The reply is level and calm; 'But you won't.'

'No, I won't.'

When they meet one of them smiles and say 'You have blue eyes.' 

(It's the beginning of a long friendship. Except it's not. It's the beginning of a short relationship - if you can call a month of screaming and sex a relationship - which is the beginning of a long friendship.)

They exchange names that aren't really their's and agencies that are and one of them comes down from a perch to the roof where the other stands with a gun packed up in a bag. As their feet touch the ground an embassy explodes.

'You just blew up a building full of people with lives and families.'

'Necessary collateral unfortunately.'

'You know my government considers that country an ally.'

'Yes.'

'I should shoot you for this.'

'But you won't.'

'No, I won't.' 

They stare at the blaze for several minutes, neither one of them speaking. (At this point who is who becomes important.)

'I would like to join your agency.' She is so confidant it is not a request.

'Why do you want to join now?'

'I prefer not to be on the loosing side.'

'Okay, seems fair enough.'

She spends a month in a cell that is a 150 square centimetres bigger than her billet back home is Russia, though it is not much cleaner. When she comes out she looks much the same as she did when she went in. She stands with her head held high and a perfectly uncaring mask covering her face. The childish piece of him wonders if he dropped her on the ground if her face would crack open like somebody's mother's porcelain and show all the ugliness beneath. 

There first real mission together is Budapest, and while the mission itself goes flawlessly (Because yes, she really is that good.) and he has what is, for a very long time, some of the best sex of his life, it's a disaster. They fuck violently and quickly. The sex has little to to with passion and lots to do with lust. The cheap plaster if the wall of their hotel room cracks when her head hits the wall and their and shards of glass in his back from where she slammed him into the mirror. He's sure by the end of the mission he's been injured more times in a single mission then he has in the last four years of his SHIELD service combined.

As they climb out of the plane on their way to be debriefed she holds out her hand to him. 

'Friends?' He knows she's not just asking to be friends, not even just friends and nothing else, she's offering her back to him, not her trust, but a partnership, which he knows that, to her at least, is one of the most valuable things in the world. 

He takes her hand.


	9. One More Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She can no longer picture the idyllic life as Princess and eventually Queen as she once could, it is tainted by the knowledge that, no matter what, she could never love Thor the way he should be loved. And for that alone she will never be able to marry him.
> 
>  
> 
> Sif lets go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Canada Day!  
> Bless you Sir John and may you and your cronies never run out of gin.
> 
> This is less related to the topic of past relationships then the other chapters but I felt that Sif's relationships with the Odinsons deserves exploration.

They're bound together from the cradle, when their mothers laid them out on blankets and planned a royal wedding. That, Sif would one day become the queen of Asgard was a fact that Sif had been secure in for as pond as she had been able to understand words, so she'd spent some portion of her life picturing what it would be like to wed Thor. She'd considered the names of their children, her coat-of-arms, wedding armour, which sword she would present to her betrothed on their wedding day.

Sif would hesitate, even then, to say she was in love with Thor, indeed, the idea seemed vaguely incestuous, even then, but she was accustomed to it, and saw it as a When rather than an If. 

'Do you want to wed my brother?' Sif once sat next to Loki at one of Thor's Birthing Day feasts. This was the first thing Loki had said to her all night. Nobody had ever asked her that, it had only ever been given to her as a fact, an inevitability, something that could not be escaped.

'I don't know.' Sif mused thoughtfully, 'Not wedding your brother has never been an option for me, so I have never considered any alternatives.' 

Loki nodded and frowned slightly, but said no more on the topic and turned back to his wild boar.

But the seeds of doubt had been planted in her mind, and like a vine they grew and invaded her thoughts. She could no longer simply look at Thor and accept her fate. She began to compare Thor with the rest of her comrades, and though she cannot find most of them desirable mates, she can no longer say that she believes she would be happy with Thor.

She can no longer picture the idyllic life as Princess and eventually Queen as she once could, it is tainted by the knowledge that, no matter what, she could never love Thor the way he should be loved. And for that alone she will never be able to marry him.

She and Loki sat on the bridge connecting Asgard to the Bifrost, staring out in to the Abyss. Loki was absentmindedly tossing a golden orb between his hands while Sif swung her feet and stared into the nothingness that threatened to consume the rainbow bridge.

'How does one make a difficult choice that could hurt many people that one cares about? How do I know which decision is the right one?' Loki tilts his head at the question and considers it as Thor and the Warriors Three never would.

Suddenly, as if by accident, the orb slipped from the tips of Loki's fingers, plunging down into the nothingness below them.

'That is how one makes a difficult decision. One lets go.'

Fortunately for her, Sif never has to make that choice, instead they charge off into Jotunheim. Later, much later, Thor will say that it was the beginning of the end, but Sif knows that the end began the moment Odin and Laufey made war. The end began when Fandral or Hogun or Volstagg or Thor or even Sif herself mocked Loki. The end began when Loki asked Sif a question that she couldn't answer. It began when two princes were born. It began in the past and it will begin in the future and it is beginning as we speak.

When Thor is sent away she watches as Loki's plans unfold, carefully manipulating the people who have pushed him to the side for so many years. Sif knows it is wrong, hates what it does to the kingdom and the people she cares about, yet a tiny, traitorous part of her cannot help but wonder if Loki deserves vengeance after all they have done to him.

He makes a decision too, to be shamed by those who claim to be his peers, to let his life swing forever in the balance, or to simply let go and let life take its course.

She does not know what she thinks of Jane Foster. Thor is hers, or at least she has been told that he is hers and she is his since they were children. Yet Jane Foster brings light to Thor's eyes that Sif has never seen before and she cannot begrudge him what she cannot herself give him. And so she lets go.

Sif does not watch as Loki is escorted through Asgard in chains. She does not watch because she does not need to see. Sif knows what she will see and she does not want to sully her perfectly edited childhood memories with sights of a boy who was once the only person who cared how she felt being paraded for those who mocked him and yet once called him friend in chains. 

She goes to his cell once. They do not speak, she simply sits across from him and stares, never breaking eye contact. It could have been hours, it could have been minutes, she's not sure.

'Letting go doesn't mean being alone.'

She gets up and leaves.

Sif lets go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The line 'And that is how one makes a difficult decision. One lets go.' is paraphrased from Kill Shakespeare, vol. 1.


End file.
